Spike showed up three hours later in white denim jeans two inches too short, a pair of high-tops, and an ecological activist's tee-shirt that pictured a wave of garbage engulfing the earth; the shirt was pink and he wore it with shoulders hunched and arms hanging loosely to his sides as if he were allergic to it. His eyes were murderous. Buffy tried not to laugh, not to be polite, but because if she did, she might fold over in helpless hilarity and expose her neck--no risk there of course; it was the principle of the thing.

The clench of Rodney's body was slick but grudging, and John thought that every part of his body could make a fist--mouth, brow, and clefted shoulder blades--but greedy, not angry. Muscular shudders ran along the back of his thighs and reverberated in John until their bodies were waves smashing up against waves. They had only a few minutes and John was racing to beat the clock when his comm buzzed, triggering his climax, just in time, just in time.

There was an infant moment between them, barely born and fragile, when they were looking at each other almost by accident; it was that first real look that Xander always remembered when he walked through Sunnydale's graveyards, because every graveyard was identical to the one where it'd happened--trees and fresh dirt and dead people. Romantic places, graveyards; lots of good vibrations, good times, good kills.

"Remember that time we scorched those zombies," Xander said dreamily, putting an arm around Spike's waist as his thoughts meandered.

Faith had learned early on that life wasn't a rough draft. It was the final draft, the only draft. When she got back in London she walked off the plane, went straight to a pay-phone and gave Buffy a ring.

"Hello?" Buffy said, a small blonde voice on the other end, the one thin ray of sunshine that had survived Sunnydale.

Radek was sitting hunched at his computer, headphones on, one hand crumpling a tissue to his sniffling nose, the other tapping a rather obsolete pencil against the keyboard. John slid up behind him and hooked his chin over the nearest shoulder.

"I had this dream last night where I made wild monkey love to a nebbishy engineer in Lab 3," he said, thinking even as the words left his mouth that it maybe wasn't his best line.

It was terrible not to know, never to know, the moment when friendship became a charade, honesty deception...Francie, Allison. It should have been obvious to her, she should have seen, known, understood, and late at night her mind would return to that time, and she'd turn her fault over and over, polishing it to a high shine that kept her awake like a bright light above her bed. The light was the simplicity of self-blame, the only thing in her life that boiled down to black and white.

When Lindsey moved into the Hyperion he discovered that the team of Angel Investigations weren't just a band of misguided halos who lived and breathed--most of them--the fight against evil. Wes was proprietary about his lemon curd, hiding it in the depths of the fridge and measuring the level each morning; he also hoarded ballpoint pens and carbon paper in unopened boxes that dated back to the seventies; Gunn played basketball in the lobby without a net, keeping score against himself in a ringing voice; Cordelia bought five glossy bags of expensive clothes every weekend and returned four of them the next weekend with regretful sighs, keeping up a pretense that they didn't fit as well as she'd thought, and not that her wallet couldn't stand the strain. And Angel, Lindsey discovered one night when looking for a towel--Angel had a stash of thirty-five lint brushes in a trunk in his closet, which explained a lot about the fetishistic, hypnotic habit he had of rolling brushes over his designer suits.

In bed, Jack's length was no cradle of warmth; he wasn't a warm and fuzzy guy, not the kind of guy you woke up cuddling. He was a hard, cool length, like a gun or a really uncomfortable futon, and Vaughn loved that. He was partial to loaded guns and edges that kept him awake.

Blair was woken from his nap by the whine of the band-saw cutting through his dreams, but he didn't mind much; in his dream he'd been fly-fishing in the creek for a murderer and reeling in his line, which was an intersection of literal and metaphorical that he could live without. The smell of fresh lumber drifted through the open door, thick enough to leave particles on the screen. He shifted his head on the couch cushion two inches, enough to catch a glimpse of Jim bent busily over the sawhorses in a sweat-damp shirt and nerdy safety goggles, a vision of buff manhood that was worth waking up to.

"My wand may be hot, but it's not little," Black said coolly, doing furtive things with his hands inside the black velvet bag that Snape couldn't quite see, no matter how much he craned his neck. "And really, Severus--wand puns?--why don't we leave those to the first years."